Posts Tagged ‘melancholia’

If you read the popular press, you are aware of the controversy about dropping the bereavement exclusion from the diagnosis of Major Depressive Disorder in DSM-V. The Lancet published an editorial in their February 18th issue decrying what they called the classification of grief as a mental illness. The same issue carried a moving Perspective by Dr. Arthur Kleinman, who described the recent death of his wife, his own bereavement, and his warning against “medicalizing” grief.

Freud struggled with the separation of grief and depression. His elegant monograph Mourning and Melancholia bears re-reading today.

The thought of turning natural grief into an illness and treating it with drugs is anathema to me. Grieving truly is a normal, personal, intimate process. It requires friends and loved ones and, as Freud describes, it is a gradual, healing path of saying good-bye and moving forward with the rest of one’s life.

But sometimes loss triggers the pathological mood state of depression. I have seen patients whose normal grief went off track and ground to a halt when the pall of depression descended on them. When they were treated with antidepressants or psychotherapy, they were able to resume the healing process, move forward in grieving, and find their place again in the world.

I am no expert in nosology. But as a clinical psychiatrist, I do hope the framers of the next DSM will find a path between the extremes—neither medicalizing a normal process, nor making it impossible for a grieving person who then develops depression to legitimately receive proper treatment.